Gluck

by Diana Souhami

  He did not comprehend that when Gluck was to drift apart from C., there were plenty of other women to fill the gap in the transference chain. Strong hopes were pinned on Louis and his power to persuade his sister to follow a straighter path. He and Gluck were very close at that time, though in later years they quarrelled. She wrote to him often – to ‘Dearest darling Ludovici’, ‘Dearest, dearest Luigini’, ‘Dearest, dearest, darling old thing’ – confided news of Craig, work and adventure, told him the books she was reading, the Lamorna gossip, the shows she was seeing in town and joked with him about their parents’ foibles and fussy ways. ‘Of course my Ludo,’ she wrote to him when she was twenty-three and he twenty-one, ‘you know I shall always stick by you and I hope we shall always understand or try to understand one another and be the very closest of pals.’ She even suggested that they go away together to live the artistic life – he was to be a writer: ‘My dear there is nothing I should like better than to go with you and live of and with a place. We two alone …’13 But there was no way that he could persuade or dissuade her on any issue and nor did he try. Given, though, his unwavering loyalty to his parents, his strong conservatism and conformity, he was surprisingly tolerant of her outrageous garb, artistic ambitions and sexual leanings. When, years later, there was a rift between them, it was because of clashes over Gluck’s business affairs, rather than how she lived.

  Gluck wanted, too, to get on well with her mother and father. She was, they conceded, very affectionate. She was fond of them both and particularly so of her mother. But she regarded compromise as self-betrayal and was of a totally determined disposition. If she felt she must paint, wear plus fours and woo the ladies, nothing in the world would stop her. Her passions, desires and whims were imperative and paramount. In later years they hardened into obsessions, and caused her, and all close to her, considerable damage.

  She saw her parents when in town, dined with them at the Trocadero and appreciated the ‘excellent Burgundy’, but embarrassed her father by her appearance. They saw, with Louis’ best friend, Peter Layard, later killed in the war, a ‘priceless spy play called “Pigeon Post”’, by Seymour Obermer, at the Garrick Theatre, sat in the front row of the dress circle and ate chocolates the size of hens’ eggs. ‘It was a thorough spy drama’, Peter wrote to Louis (25 May 1918), ‘and Hannah and I screamed silently all the time at the most tragic parts and your Papa was fearfully thrilled as were your Mama, myself and also Hannah I think, but the latter too blasé to admit it.’ Eighteen years later Gluck was to fall totally in love with Seymour Obermer’s wife.

  The ‘kink in the brain’ was there to stay and common ground with her parents was hard to find. ‘I hear that her work is very good but it gives me no pleasure under all the circumstances,’ her father remarked. With Craig as her ally Gluck entered another world. She visited Craig’s parental home, as she told Louis:

  I went into the bathroom, locked the door, put a penny in the meter lit the geyser in the approved fashion and a thin stream of water gradually growing hotter weakly fell from the tap. When it had covered the bottom of the bath with a thin layer I stepped in jauntily and it rose majestically to my ankle. Naturally I then reclined luxuriously and pretended it was a beautiful hot bath. Just as I was getting comfortable the damn thing backfired or something and flames began to dash about. I leapt at it like a wild beast and shut off all the taps at once with teeth-hair-hands-feet, anything that came handy. I took no risks as to which tap was turned off first. The vision of me leaping like a catherine wheel waving arms and legs frantically must appeal to you. And that was the end of a perfect bath.14

  In 1918 she and Craig went, with four thousand others, to the Victory Ball at the Albert Hall. They dressed as Pierrot and Columbine, danced from ten at night until five in the morning, then commandeered a private car to take them home. They made their costumes and Craig’s got a special mention in The Sketch. It was black and silver with a head-dress of clustered pearls lent by her landlady. They went to the Russian Ballet at the Coliseum with Gluck wearing a cossack hat, plus fours and black boots. Those were the days of the great Diaghilev productions, with costumes by Léon Bakst and dancing by Pavlova, Nijinsky and Léonid Massine. ‘It is a real treat’, Gluck said – and rued its passing:

  It is terrible to think that there will not be any more Imperial Russian Ballet. The present and future generations will have to work very hard indeed to replace a tenth of the beautiful things that have become obsolete or been destroyed by this war.15

  They went to Promenade Concerts, shopped from barrows in Soho and found an Italian restaurant where they could eat spaghetti. ‘She is an enigma to me,’ said the Meteor. ‘I live in the hope of an awakening some day, but till then must suffer in silence.… I don’t worry any more. It is useless.’16

  The income accorded Gluck by her father meant she could do as she pleased. Living in Lamorna was cheap. Few of the artists there had any money. She subsidized the small income Craig earned from illustrating. As well as their Finchley Road flat Gluck rented two rooms in Earls Court as her London studio. She decorated the place herself. One room she painted black, with a white ceiling:

  black plain walls, black board floor and ivory coloured woodwork – the chairs and tables are black … the effect is topping and not at all funereal. In fact it is a most cheery little room … I got smothered in black paint and enamel and looked a sketch.17

  This was to be her workplace, and in it she kept only the picture she was working on. The other room she painted white, used for ‘entertaining’ and storing pictures and hung a ‘beautiful, old rare Japanese print’ on the wall.

  With this freedom of town and country living, of parental support if not approval, of declared ambition and sexual preference, she proceeded to work hard and well. Within a few years she had enough good work for two ‘one-man shows’ at London galleries. The first at the Dorien Leigh Gallery in South Kensington in 1924, the second, in 1926, at The Fine Art Society in Bond Street, where all her subsequent exhibitions were held.

  The first picture she did in her all-black studio was of the view from the window – a huddle of roof tops and chimneys, a leaden sky and a scattering of raindrops on the window. It was reproduced in The Studio in 1924. Commissions came in for portraits. One of her earliest and best portraits was of ‘Bettina’, a South American model who was to marry the sculptor Eric Schilksy. After a tragic love affair she killed herself in 1944. In a glancing moment, in Gluck’s picture of her, Bettina adjusts her hat, but the vase-like beauty of her profile is permanent.

  Similar to ‘Bettina’ but more stylized and provocative, was ‘Lady in Mask’ in silvers and greys, with textures of chiffon, velvet and silk and flesh like pale pink marble. It caused a stir when reproduced on the cover of Drawing and Design in October 1924. It embodied the sophisticated gaiety of the 1920s – the party days which Evelyn Waugh mocked in Vile Bodies:

  Masked parties, savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as someone else and almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night-clubs, in windmills and swimming baths.18

  And it showed Gluck’s fascination with sophisticated women who were glamorous and remote.

  She did a small, finely-detailed portrait of Craig, in cool colours, sad-eyed and huddled into her fur collar and a bright portrait of Nancy Morris, sister of the artist Cedric Morris, swathed in an orange scarf, her hair bobbed short, smoking a cigarette in an amber holder. She painted the actress Teddie Gerrard – notorious for her fast living, backless dresses and high-born lovers – looking demure and girlish in a white-collared frock. She did an exuberant picture, ‘Flora’s Cloak’, of a naked girl jumping astride the world with hair flying and wings of flowers. She painted a friend with feverish eyes dying of tuberculosis; a girl in a hat of shimmering green feathers and the artistic young men she met at the Café Royal.

&n
bsp; She dashed off these portraits with virtuoso freshness, confident that she was revealing the quintessential self of her sitters:

  All men’s gestures are self-revealing.… In some lightning split second you will see the complete revelation of the person in their pose.… You should be aware of this as the spiritually dominating factor from which nothing in your subsequent handling should distract.… This vision must pass through the crucible of your spirit.… This emotion is on a wave length that you must be able to tune in to at will … essential characteristics must be assimilated to such a concentrated degree that no accidental change of light or mood can shake you.… This Divine Blindness is your holy of holies which nothing else must enter, however seductive. Do not try and see everything, only put down that which is essential to the realisation of the essence of your sitter.

  Once you have placed all this in a large way on your canvas, you can then attend to all the superimposed details which enhance your original vision and give it more depth of characterisation. For instance you might feel that the hands of your sitter were a complement to point the head or a contradiction to give the depth of duality …19

  Gluck’s exhibition at the Dorien Leigh Gallery opened on 14 October 1924. There were fifty-seven pictures in it. ‘The new and much-discussed artist, Gluck,’ said The Sketch,

  wears her hair brushed back from her forehead just like a boy and when in Cornwall goes about in shorts. At her show at the Dorien Leigh Galleries she had a long black cloak covering a masculine attire and was busy shaking hands with her left hand, for she had hurt one of her fingers on the other and wore her arm in a sling …

  Drawing and Design ran two consecutive features on her, declared ‘… we believe Gluck has a great future’ and wrote of the exceptional originality of her work. High praise came in a letter (30 October 1924) from her friend, Prudence Maufe, an interior designer married to the architect Edward Maufe who designed Gluck’s studio when later she moved to Hampstead:

  … here at last is serious and beautiful painting with so many qualities of rightness about it as to fill me with a supreme sense of beauty and happiness. My dear, thank you for having painted. The first and last point to my mind is the quality of your paint. It has a texture and depth which I consider masterly. Then I like your decorative quality. Then I like your composition. I think your portraits are the best. I think the landscapes a little exaggerated and the group of the jockey quite wonderful. I was a little disappointed in ‘Flora’ – her hair seemed to me to dominate too much. The rest was exquisite and we were horribly tempted to buy.

  All Gluck’s pictures were sold and by 1926 she had enough material for a new show. At the time of her first exhibition she moved from her black and white rooms in Earls Court to a large studio in Tite Street, Chelsea, formerly used by Whistler. Craig was still with her, though more tenuously as Gluck began to mix in smart society. The same year, Romaine Brooks and Gluck arranged to do portraits of each other. Romaine called her work, which was about three feet by two feet, ‘Peter, a young English girl’, and exhibited it in her 1925 exhibition along with pictures of the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio, with whom she was having a tortuous relationship, and ‘Una, Lady Troubridge’, who lived with Radclyffe Hall. Romaine was twenty years older than Gluck and already notorious for her wealth, lesbian affairs with Ida Rubinstein and Natalie Barney and unorthodox life in the Paris salons.

  She went to Gluck’s Tite Street studio for the reciprocal portrait. ‘The elephant has come to the temple,’ Gluck remarked of the visit. She thought Romaine’s work technically and psychologically inferior to her own and scorned the ‘lesbian haute-monde’ as she called Romaine’s social circle. ‘All those people were very boring,’ she said of them.20 Gluck wanted to do a life-size picture and primed a six foot canvas. ‘Romaine Brooks was a big woman’, she said in defence of her choice of size. The encounter was not happy:

  Romaine wasted so much sitting time in making a row that at last I was only left an hour in which to do what I did – but my rage and tension gave me almost superhuman powers … she insisted I should do one of my ‘little pictures’. I refused so she left me with the unfinished portrait. However, I had to give away many photographs of it to her friends!21

  Eventually she used the canvas for something else.

  Gluck called her 1926 exhibition at The Fine Art Society ‘Stage and Country’. It was a reflection of her two worlds – the parochialism and peace of Cornwall and the theatre, sophistication and fun of London. Those were the dancing years, and almost every London hotel or restaurant had a band or floor show. Many of the smart eating places were owned by Gluck’s family, so she had easy access to café lifé. Lyons Corner House in Coventry Street had an orchestra on each floor. Jack Hylton’s band, of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ fame, played at the Piccadilly Hotel. In 1924 Gluck’s uncle Montague asked C. B. Cochran to stage a cabaret in the grill room of the Trocadero in Shaftesbury Avenue. ‘In my career as a showman there is no association which has given me greater pleasure than that with Messrs Lyons,’ Cochran wrote in his memoirs.22

  For the next fifteen years, up to the outbreak of war, his cabarets, called Champagne Time, Supper Time, Going to Town and the like, ran continuously. They were a show-case for talent. There was music by Richard Rogers, Cole Porter, Roger Quilter; sketches by Noel Coward; choreography by Léonid Massine, Frederick Ashton and Balanchine; sets and costumes by Gladys Calthrop, Chrétien Berard, Rex Whistler, Edmund Dulac and Norman Wilkinson; ‘girls’ like Anna Neagle and Alice Delysia singing ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ and ‘All Alone’. The cabarets featured singers, dancers, acrobatists, contortionists, clowns and comic turns. And Cochran’s guests at his first-night table were the focus of the society columnists:

  Among my guests at my first-night table have been Elisabeth Bergner, Tallulah Bankhead, Ivor Novello, Douglas Fairbanks, father and son, Mary Pickford Roma June … Diaghileff and his stars …23

  The London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian described the Trocadero in 1926 as ‘the meeting place of those who wore evening clothes and those who did not … a real institution recalling the position of Evans’s Supper Rooms of Thackeray’s days.’24 Thirteen of the pictures in Gluck’s ‘Stage and Country’ exhibition were of the Cochran reviews: the dancers, musicians and audience. Through these pictures her work connects to the gaiety of the twenties.

  Opposite the Trocadero was the London Pavilion, advertised in neon as ‘The Centre of the World’. There, in 1925, Cochran staged ‘On with the Dance’, London’s first great dancing show. ‘For variety of terpsichorean effect and speed, I doubt if it has ever been excelled’ wrote Cochran of it. ‘Mr Cochran’s Young Ladies’ had to be neat steppers. Laurie Devine, one of the first acrobatic dancers, stood on her elbows, Terri Storri did smart contortionist work, Florence Desmond, ‘Dessy’, in a costume designed by Doris Zinkeisen, with a top hat, waistcoat and cheeky gloves and duotone boots did a stylized cake-walk which always got a tremendous round of applause. And they all did the can-can. Gluck saw ‘On with the Dance’ again and again and sketched behind the scenes. Her paintings record the show.

  The stage at the Pavilion was the size of a large dining table, there was one narrow entrance and flats, props and large hoop dresses had to be suspended from the flies. She painted ‘Dessy’ doing her cake-walk in a beam of light, Massine, waiting for his cue, Ernest Thesiger, described as ‘London’s most versatile actor,’ waiting to go on stage – with Douglas Byng he did a transvestite act – the saxophonist Emmett Baker, ‘The Three Nifty Nats’ doing a song and dance routine. Gluck later described this as one of the true art deco paintings. The stage set was by Gladys Calthrop who often worked with Noel Coward.

  ‘Stage and Country’ opened in April 1926. ‘Plus fours, hell’, she wrote on the envelope in which she kept its reviews. They drew attention of course to her Eton crop, breeches, man’s soft hat, name and pipe and there were photographs of her looking like a squire in many of the papers. ‘I addressed h
im naturally as “Mr Gluck”’, wrote ‘Onlooker’ in the Daily Graphic (9 April 1926).

  It was with a considerable shock that I found myself being answered in a soft voice, essentially feminine. I do not know that I should altogether like my own wife or my own daughters to adopt Miss Gluck’s style of dressing her hair or clothing her limbs, but I do know that I should be proud of them if they could paint as well as Miss Gluck paints …

  He went on to say that her ‘emulation of masculine virtues’ was ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’.

  The critics enjoyed themselves, but were full of praise. ‘A less derivative style I have not seen for many a long day’ said L.G.S. in the Art News (4 April 1926):

  It is a curious compound of the masculine and the feminine point of view in art. There is the fine delicacy of the woman artist and the humour and clear-cut vision of the man …

  and Drawing and Design ran a four-page feature which spoke of her vivacity of spirit, rhythm of composition, subtlety of design and of the breadth and detachment of her mind.

  The forty-four pictures in the exhibition reflected her life: her self-portrait in beret, tie and braces, with a cigarette hanging from her lips; Lamorna at dawn; Ella Naper at Dozmare Pool; the base of a waterfall on the Moors where rivulets of water bubble into a deep pool; the races at St Buryan. And contrapuntal to the light of the Cornish skies, she painted the spotlit world of the theatre. Ernest Thesiger facing his audience, the contrast of ‘On and Off’ stage in a scene from a play at the Duke of York theatre, Grock, the clown about to do a backward somersault. The show confirmed her reputation as a painter of her time. No word was breathed of her Gluckstein connections.

  Her father cannot have liked opening his copies of The Tatler and The Sketch in April 1926 and seeing large photographs of his daughter in trousers and a tie. Perhaps he was relieved she had abandoned his name. But at least the world declared her work good. He was suffering with heart trouble from which he died four years later. He had had the consolation of his son’s return home from the war in 1918. Louis lived at home until his marriage in 1926 when he moved to a house nearby. Ever the dutiful son, he did all he could to please his parents. He even made trips with them to Vichy in their quest for health, as he told Gluck (10 August 1924):